“Well,” Stan said, “it'll soon be over. If this plan works, we'll have ourselves a pilot.”
“And if it doesn't work?”
“We could be dead.”
“Fair enough. Where are we going?”
“To look up an old friend of mine and make him an offer he can't refuse.”
13
Jersey City, even in its best days, had been a city many people found objectionable.
It hadn't improved much since the days before the Human-Alien Wars and the human reoccupation. On the day Stan and Julie went there, half of the streets downtown were awash due to a burst water main from a week before, and the city's repair crews still hadn't gotten around to capping it.
Ragged, mean-looking men and women hung around every street corner. They looked like down-and-outers, but there was something sly and dangerous about them, too. There were soup kitchens set up here and there, and the buildings looked old and dilapidated. Even the newly built sections of the city were starting to show wear, their poor construction materials already crumbling. Packs of wild dogs slinked in and out of back alleys; nobody had gotten around to getting rid of them yet.
“It's pretty bad,” Stan said, like he was apologizing for it.
“Hey, I've seen worse,” Julie said. “Not that I want to hang around this place …”
At Central Station, Stan found them a motorized pedicab. The driver was a gnarled old brute, dressed nearly in rags, with a shapeless felt hat on which, incongruously, was the glittering bright medallion that let him legally operate a for-hire vehicle.
Stan peered inside the three-wheel pedicab. Some of these drivers had been known to hide accomplices inside, the better to rob the customers, or so it was said. Stan didn't really know what to expect. He hadn't been outside New York City in years.
He gave the driver the address, and the man grunted. “You sure you want to go there, mister?”
“Yes, I'm sure. Why do you ask?”
“You're going to the heart of the old Gaslight District. Where the space derelicts and the chemheads hang out.”
“Yes, I know.”
“No place for a lady, either.”
“Shut your face and get moving,” Julie said.
“Long as you know what you're getting into.” The pedicab operator started up the hand-cranked washing-machine motor that ran his little vehicle. Stan and Julie settled back.
Once the driver got up to speed, he gave them a dashing ride. He wove in and out of traffic on Jersey City's wide boulevards, the pedicab dodging in and out of the debris that the striking garbage collectors would get around to picking up once they settled their contract with the city. The street was like an obstacle course, filled with boxes, packing cases, mattresses, wrecked vehicles, even the carcass of a horse. There were also plenty of vehicles, driven by kamikaze drivers who were hell-bent on getting somewhere, anywhere, rushing around and dodging in and out of each other's way like rules of the road were no more than memories. There was a dirty gray sky overhead, the sun concealed behind dark-edged clouds. It wasn't anyone's fault that the day was so rotten, but you felt like blaming someone anyhow. Looking around, Stan thought, “To paraphrase Robert Browning, anything so ugly had to be evil.”
“How do you like it?” the driver asked, turning back to fix Stan with a hard look.
“The city? It looks like it's fallen on hard times.”
“Buddy, you can say that again. This has always been a bad-luck city. Gutted during the Alien Wars. That happened to a lot of cities. Gave them a chance to rebuild. Only crappier.”
“Well, things are tough all over,” Stan said, wishing the driver would turn around and pay attention to the traffic.
The driver acted like he had eyes in the back of his head. Cars came shrieking at him from every direction; and somehow they always missed and he kept right on talking.
“You're from New York, right? I can always tell. You people didn't get the Pulsing Plague like we got it here in Jersey. Turned whole neighborhoods into madhouses filled with raving lunatics before it did them the favor of killing them. But not all of them, worse luck. There are some plague people still alive, you know. They were infected, but it didn't kill them. But it can kill you if they touch you.”
“I've been inoculated against plague,” Stan said.
“Sure. But what good will an inoculation do you against the new berserkers you get around here? They're mostly people who recovered from the Pulser, but with something missing. It was like some center of control in their heads just vanished. Berserkers can get into a frenzy over the smallest thing, over nothing at all. And then watch out for them because they start killing and don't stop until somebody stops them.”
“I'll watch out for them,” Stan said, feeling very uncomfortable.
What was he getting himself and Julie into?
“You wanta good restaurant?” the driver said suddenly.
“Try Toy's Oriental Palace over on Ogden. They got a way with soypro you'd never believe. They use real spices in their sauces, too.”
“Thanks, I'll remember that,” Stan said. “Are we close now?”
“You can smell it, can't you?” the driver said, grinning.
“Yep, we're just about there.”
The driver slowed down and looked for an opening in the traffic, found one that was too small, and decided to make it larger. He propelled the little pedicab into it, suffering no more than a bruised bumper, ducked into a narrow street off the boulevard, took a couple of turns, and pulled up to the curb.
Stan and Julie got out. Stan saw they were in an evil-looking neighborhood, which was just about what he'd expected. Above him, rising above the buildings, he saw a landmark: the spire of the Commercial Services Landing Field, a local service facility where non-stellar spaceships took off and landed. There had been a lot of discussion about it in the newly formed city council. Too close to the city, some said. It could be a source of danger. If one of those things goes down … Some people still didn't trust spacecrafts. It was a point, but the other side had the answer. “It'll bring jobs into the city. We'll be the closest full-facility field within a hundred-mile radius of New York. A lot closer than the Montauk Point facility. The business will flock to us.” And in Jersey City, where business is king and corruption is its adviser, there was no answer to that.
The spaceport's spire was several miles away, Stan figured. He was in a neighborhood of small ramshackle buildings built against the bulwark of several skyscrapers.
He was standing in front of Gabrielli's Meat Market, advertising fresh pork today in addition to the usual soypro steaks and turkeytofu butterballs, and the place stank of blood and chemicals. Next to it was a small newsstand, and what looked like a betting parlor beside that betting was legal in the state of New Jersey, an important source of revenue. Most of the state legislature didn't approve of gambling, but money was hard to find these days, even with the giant Bio-Pharm plant recently opened in nearby Hoboken and with MBSW — the Mercedes-Benz Spaceship Works — sprawled out in Lodi.
A young woman, perhaps sixteen or seventeen years old, came up to Stan. She was slender and tall, and she wore a new motorcycle jacket. Ignoring Julie, she said, “Can I help you, mister?”
Stan shook his head. “I'm not interested today, thank you.”
She glared at him. “You think I'm selling sex? Forget it, stupid. I can see you got a lady with you. And besides, you don't have enough to buy me.”
“What are you offering, then?” Stan said.
“Advice. Guidance.”
Stan couldn't help laughing. “Thanks, but we can do without it.”
“Can you really? You people from around here?”
“No, as a matter of fact.”